Triplet correlation in sheared suspensions of Brownian particles

Triplet microstructure of sheared concentrated suspensions of Brownian monodisperse spherical particles is studied by sampling realizations of a three-dimensional unit cell subject to periodic boundary conditions obtained in accelerated Stokesian dynamics simulations. Triplets are regarded as a bridge between particle pairs and many-particle clusters thought responsible for shear thickening. Triplet-correlation data for weakly sheared near-equilibrium systems display an excluded volume effect of accumulated correlation for equilateral contacting triplets. As the Péclet number increases, there is a change in the preferred contacting isosceles triplet configuration, away from the "closed" triplet where the particles lie at the vertices of an equilateral triangle and toward the fully extended rod-like linear arrangement termed the "open" triplet. This transition is most pronounced for triplets lying in the plane of shear, where the open triplets' angular orientation with respect to the flow is very similar to that of a contacting pair. The correlation of suspension rheology to observed structure signals onset of larger clusters. An investigation of the predictive ability of Kirkwood's superposition approximation (KSA) provides valuable insights into the relationship between the pair and triplet probability distributions and helps achieve a better and more detailed understanding of the interplay of the pair and triplet dynamics. The KSA is seen more successfully to predict the shape of isosceles contacting triplet nonequilibrium distributions in the plane of shear than for similar configurations in equilibrium hard-sphere systems; in the sheared case, the discrepancies in magnitudes of distribution peaks are attributable to two interaction effects when pair average trajectories and locations of particles change in response to real, or "hard," and probabilistically favored ("soft") neighboring excluded volumes and, in the case of open triplets, due to changes in the correlation of the farthest separated pair caused by the fixed presence of the particle in the middle.